JULY 20, 2006

What F1 has learned from the Citroen 2CV and why the FIA has to stop it

Ferrari and Renault have been informed in recent days that they have to change their front damping systems because they have moving parts inside the dampers and these are banned under Article 3.15 of the FIA Formula 1 Technical Regulations for 2006. The rules state that all parts of the car must be "rigidly secured to the entirely sprung part of the car" and "must remain immobile in relation to the sprung part of the car". The FIA has concluded that weights inside the dampers cannot be acceptable. The aim of these weights is to reduce the amount of vibration from the tyres that is transmitted to the chassis and thus make the car more stable. Reducing bounce from the tyres means that the cars get more grip.

The concept was first used in the the Citroen 2CV in the late 1940s and was designed to reduce wheel patter, vertical oscillation of the wheels caused by the tyres. More recently, however, the same basic concept has been used in architectural design to reduce resonance created by wind or earthquakes.

It will be interesting to see whether the rule changes will have any noticeable effect on the performance of the cars.